


The Flickers

by apollos



Series: all the times in-between [10]
Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Coda, Death, Graphic Description of Corpses, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Unhealthy Relationships, dennis like as a person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:28:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21828976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Dennis and his mother's corpse. Coda for 8x06, ""Charlie's Mom Has Cancer."
Relationships: Mac McDonald/Dennis Reynolds
Series: all the times in-between [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1478432
Comments: 10
Kudos: 51





	The Flickers

_lift me up_  
_life me over it_

\--son lux, "flickers"

An uncovered corpse. Not even a skeleton. Dennis saw the necrotizing flesh, the decaying hair. Electricity replaces the blood in his veins and he's screaming, grabbing onto Dee, sobbing, begging somebody to do _something_. Charlie's in the grave and Frank's shouting about his shoes and where the _fuck_ is Mac—

"Jesus, Charlie! Cover that shit up!" Mac's in the hole, in his mother's hollowed grave, shoving Charlie aside. The lid is back on the coffin. Dennis is still screaming.

"Shut up, Jesus, you're gonna get the cops called on us!" Frank is shaking Dennis's shoulders while Dee is shoving him aside, running by herself. Charlie lopes after her, asking for a ride home, saying he can't get another gravedigging charge. Mac's out of the hole, now, and he's pulling at Dennis's arms.

"I got it, Frank."

"Well, good, 'cause I'm not about to goddamn deal with this. Fuckin' crybaby."

Dennis only sees his mother's rotting face, holes for nose and eyes and the purple-gray-brown of that dead skin, as Mac manhandles him through the cemetery, tells him to breathe, rubs his back. "That's fucked up," Mac says at one point. "Jesus Christ, Dennis, that's fucked up, I'm sorry."

Dennis tries (fails) to breathe and swoons, drags his ankles. He tries to remember his mother young and pretty. He tries to remember the curls he'd inherited. He tries to remember her fingers in his hair, scratching, telling him he was her favorite. First is worst but second is best, the little sing-song rhyme to put him to sleep. The hair on the back of his neck pricks up and he _swears_ she's risen from the grave, shambling behind him, a zombie. He throws his head back, but there's nothing there but the cemetery gates. They've made it out.

"Dennis?" Mac's asking in that hesitant way of his that Dennis normally so despises. "Dennis, do you want me to drive home?"

"Whatever." Dennis straightens his back and pushes past Mac. He goes to the passenger seat.

Dennis curls up, not bothering to buckle his seatbelt. He feels the car come to life, rocking him. A sudden flash of a memory: he was young and sick and at something with his mother. A family event of some kind. Dee and Frank were not there. Feverish, sick and woozy, his mother scooped him into the back seat, where he fell and curled up. She cooed at him, told him it'd be okay when he got home. He remembers, more than anything, that fever, the way every joint on his body felt like it'd been loosened and his bones were sliding around in his own skin. Mothers. Skeletons. Joints and bones. Dennis brings a hand to his mouth and bites.

Mac takes the hand from his mouth as soon as Dennis's teeth break skin. "Stop that."

"Fuck off," Dennis mumbles.

Mac wraps his fingers in Dennis's hand brings his hand over to his side, squeezing. Dennis sticks his tongue between his teeth, feels his molars bite into the soft meat instead.  
Dennis never visited his mother's grave before today. He forgets she's dead, sometimes. It's not that big of a difference. Once he graduated and moved out of the house, moved in with Mac, chose to live a life of degenerate filth, she went cold. Told him he wasn't her perfect little boy anymore. Insinuated things about him and Mac, and while they didn't get under Dennis's skin, it _did_ get under his skin when she said he would be a bad influence on him. As if Mac were the influencer. "You don't know me at all," he'd told her, and he slammed the door in her face, and he only felt guilty about it for maybe a minute. If memory serves him right, he went back to their apartment—the first one, withs scrapes of furniture and a weird smell of wet leaves they could never get out—and fucked Mac on the floor, made it hurt for the both of them.

Mac's hand in his had touched his mother, Dennis remembers. Mac slept with his mom. Discomfort bubbles inside of his stomach, his chest. Mac doing that was less about wanting to bang his mom and more about wanting to bang Dennis, or hurt Dennis. The latter is more likely; that's been a game they've been playing for decades, trading off, Mac fucking the truck driver, Mac fucking the rich guy, Mac fucking all the girls Dennis discards, and Dennis tightening his grip, his leash around Mac's cock. The same cock that had been inside of his mother. His dead mother. His mother, rotting in the ground with the worms in her pretty dress and her pearls.

It's too much. It is all well and truly too much.

Mac parks the car, does a shit job of it. He lets go of Dennis's hand and rushes to the passenger's side, opening Dennis's door for him. Dennis lets him, because he still can't see, because he doesn't want to walk on his own legs. Mac lets Dennis fall into him, half-carries him up the stairs to his apartment. Dennis probably looks drunk to the single person they pass on the stairs, the sad middle-aged man that lives under them and reports them for noise every other week. Let him look drunk. Let him be carried. It's all happened before.

Then they're in the apartment, and it's always the same, except now Dennis's vision has been imprinted with his dead mother's lipless smile curled off her crumbling teeth.

"Dennis, man, you wanna talk about it?" Mac is asking after he puts Dennis on the couch like Dennis is the leather jacket Mac wears in the winter, discarded but with care. "You want something to drink?"

"No."

"Do you want anything?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Can you fucking _hear_?" Dennis snarls, lifting his chin to look at Mac. The images flicker in front of his eyes, but Mac comes into focus, his wide eyes, his upturned brow. Concern, and the hands hovering around, waiting for something to do.

"Okay," he says, backing off. He doesn't leave Dennis's space. "I—I—"

"Leave me alone." Dennis grits it out, feeling the veins in his neck get tight with the effort.

He hates when Mac leaves, but Mac does leave, retreating off to his own room while giving Dennis a few glances over his shoulder. Dennis touches his own face. He has his mother's smooth, pale skin, prone to sunburn and reluctant to tanning, except artificially, and even then it will lean orange instead of a rich brown. One day his skin will sag and peel off his face in large swaths like strips of paint in a smoker's home, falling to the dirt, and revealing his white bone, just in the same way as has happened to his mother. Maybe he should be cremated. Maybe he should write a will. Who will there be to carry out his wishes? Mac? What wishes does he even have? To be worshipped? Who will worship him after Mac, too, dies?

He shakes his head, tries to get that lingering image of his mother out of his mind. He can't. He grabs at his temples, tugs on his hair. The feelings rack over him, raises the skin over his spine. If he could go back in time and strangle his self of twelve hours ago—and _Jesus_ , what a day it's been, his life is like that, sometimes, these whirlwinds of a few days where everything happens—he would. Dennis has never been superstitious. Dennis does not _believe_. The church failed to knock that tight, hidden ball of emotion lose, but he wasn't careful what he wished for. His dead mother's nails, long and sharp from the retreat of the skin from the cuticle, pulled the smallest, loosest thread of that yarn ball of emotions, and now they've spread throughout Dennis's body like a cancer. He shakes. He feels. He remembers.

_His mother on the Jersey shore, face half-hidden by a sunhat, holding a book, smiling at him and Frank and Dee, a group, a family, for once—tipping past that point, that point he doesn't tip past anymore, and rambling about his childhood stuffed elephant to Mac—his mother promising to keep it a secret that Dennis dropped out of med school so Frank would keep the money rolling—his mother keeping the secret—even after the door in her face—the lid of the coffin over her face—_

Dennis gets up from the couch and walks to Mac's room, slamming open the door. Mac's in bed, laying on his back and looking at the ceiling, still dressed except for his boots now on the floor. He goes to sit up when Dennis enters but Dennis is quick, keeps Mac on the bed with a hand to his chest. He sits on his stomach, keeps his weight balanced so it doesn't hurt Mac too much, but when Mac speaks, he's breathless. "Den?"

"Shut up," Dennis says. He traces his finger along Mac's jaw, the little needlepoints of his stubble. He drags them down his neck, puts them on his pulse point. If he sits here long enough, he'll feel Mac's heartbeat start to pick up. "How much do you love me?"

Mac laughs, this nervous little thing that makes his stomach ripple. Dennis can feel it. "I mean, of course I love you, bro. You're my best friend."

"You know what I mean." Dennis splays his hand, wrapping it around the expanse of Mac's neck, still stroking the pulse point. Mac swallows. Dennis tracks it with his palm.

 _You would let me kill you_ , Dennis thinks. _You would let me choke you out and you wouldn't even put up a fight_. (Not an original thought, and Dennis hates that he doesn't just _think_ it, he _feels_ it, and more than that, the feeling is fear. The potential terrifies him. He doesn't want Mac to die, he doesn't want Mac to go. Mac has to stay here. Dennis's fingers lose their slack on his neck.)

When Mac doesn't answer, Dennis presses, with his fingers and with his words. "You told me before," he reminds Mac. "When we thought the McPoyles were going to kill us."

"Oh, come on," Mac wheezes.

"Just tell me. How much do you love me? I know you love me. You worship me. Tell me how much."

Mac's eyelashes flutter against his cheeks, his eyes rolling. Dennis isn't applying nearly enough pressure to cut off his air supply, but for Mac, Dennis takes the air out just by walking in the room. "A lot," Mac says. "So much."

"So much what?"

"I love you so much."

"Okay." Dennis takes his hand from Mac's neck. He lays it in the little hollow between Mac's throat and collarbones, for now. He closes his eyes. He feels, and that's the worst part of the whole thing. He feels happy, he feels sad, he feels angry, he feels disappointed, he feels satisfied. He feels like he wants to get off Mac and curl up beside him and let Mac take him into his arms and pet his hair until he falls asleep. He feels like he wants to scratch Mac across the face for living the life he leads, and for the limbo that they have both created and continue to uphold, and all the little things they invent to stave off the inevitable, and that inevitable being the rotten corpse in the ground, bloated with gas, bugs crawling in and out of the holes they've eaten into the putrefying flesh, no soul to be found, no God down there, just the dark and heavy earth that smells like death.

Dennis gets up from Mac. "Goodnight."

He stops in the kitchen and takes a bottle of vodka from the freezer. He considers grabbing orange juice, decides against it. He shuts the freezer door softly enough that Mac won't hear it, because Mac knows that Dennis doesn't eat at this time of night, that the only thing he'd be looking for in the kitchen would be alcohol. He'd rather have some crack, but his legs feel so shaky, and he doesn't feel like driving around and looking for a hookup in this moment. The vodka will do. He tiptoes back to his room. He can see again, but his vision waivers as if he's about to get a migraine. The lines of his life, all the furniture in its place, flicker before him.

He shuts the door to his bedroom and then he goes into his bathroom. He stumbles a little bit, kicking off his shoes. He sits on the rim of the bathtub while he opens the bottle of Smirnoff. He chugs from it. The alcohol burns, tears springing to his eyes, and there's no release, no chaser, but he keeps going. He stops when he feels himself about to throw up and stills himself, concentrates on keeping it down, keeping it together. He puts the top back on the bottle, puts the bottle on the floor. A flare of warmth shoots down his throat, into his guts. He loves this feeling. Vodka has no calories, or at least very little, but it fills him up with fire. It's like swallowing the sun. It's like everything good in life, all the light, the halo around Dennis's head. He will drink until he blacks out. Whites out. He will perform his own baptism. He will cut the cancer from his body. He will wake up and he will not feel again.


End file.
